


Not Even a Cat Person

by theonewhohums



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Bathing/Washing, Breaking and Entering, F/M, First Meetings, Flirting, Fluff, Humor, Meeting the Parents, Nudity, Pet Shenanigans, Romance, Sharing Clothes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-05 21:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10316873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theonewhohums/pseuds/theonewhohums
Summary: In which Blair is a terrible house pet, Maka commits her first B&E, and Soul is predictably naked. (Next-Door-Neighbor AU)





	1. Not Even a Cat Person

“Oh my God, Blair. Please. Do not do this.”

Maka realizes how crazy she looks. She’s standing at base of a tree, _pleading_ with a tempestuous feline that’s perched casually on the outstretching branch hanging over her neighbor’s house. Before this she was whisper-yelling, and before that she was attempting to bribe the dumb cat, the can of tuna she was offering long since discarded on the ground when she realized that wasn’t what Blair wanted.

As if to purposefully disobey Maka, the blue-gray tabby jumps from the tree to the balcony, running inside the home of Maka’s new neighbor.

“God _dammit._ ”

And that’s how Maka finds herself climbing her next-door neighbor’s trellis, thanking God that one is so conveniently placed here (because really, who actually owns trellises outside of movies?) and praying that the thin wood doesn’t break under her weight. She acknowledges that this is definitely breaking and entering, but considering the only thing she is taking from his house is _her cat_ , she thinks that maybe it doesn’t really count. Okay, it definitely counts and the trellis is definitely groaning a lot despite the fact that she’s so small, but she’s choosing not to dwell on either of those facts. All she knows is that Blair is a bitch of a cat and will pee on everything in this man’s house unless she retrieves her. And maybe, just maybe, the guy won’t be home.

She flips over the balcony railing with about as much grace as a drugged seal, flopping flat on her back and groaning quietly in pain. She sits up and looks around, noting that the French doors leading into his house are cracked open just enough for a spiteful cat to slip inside.

The kitchen light is on and Maka curses her luck even more, because this guy is definitely home and she is almost definitely screwed. Especially because Blair is sitting on his kitchen counter cleaning herself smugly, and Maka knows that to retrieve her cat she’s going to have to enter this man’s house.

“Okay,” she whispers under her breath, because she really needs a pep talk right now and the only one to give it is her. “Sneak in, get the cat, get out. Then maybe mail this guy an anonymous fruit basket for breaking into his house. Unless he’s more of a muffin guy—”

And that’s when the guy-next-door emerges from the bathroom into his kitchen, his fair hair damp and his waist wrapped in only a towel.

Maka’s mouth drops. Dear Lord, he is _hot_.

And totally walking right towards her cat. Oh shit.

“Hey lil fella, what are you doing in my kitchen? Are you making dinner tonight?” The man walks over to Blair and scratches behind her ear. Maka smiles behind her hand. “And what’s that smell?”

Oh God. It can’t be. She inhales as hard as she can without being too loud, and then she smells it. Cat pee. Blair has peed somewhere in this attractive man’s kitchen.

She scans the room briefly from where she’s hiding behind a ficus, but she can’t find the source of the pee smell. But she does see her toned neighbor touch Blair’s collar and search for a license.

“So you’re not a stray, huh? Then I guess I should probably return you to your family. They might be worried about you.”

‘Worried’ is putting it lightly. Maka never even wanted a cat to begin with, but when a stray had kittens in her backyard and abandoned them she felt she had no choice but to take them in. Apparently choosing Blair as the one to keep was a poor mistake on her part, because the cat was much more trouble than she was worth. No, Maka isn’t worried about Blair, who is fully capable of running away and breaking into other people’s houses, she is worried about _this man_ , who now has to deal with her. And who is getting much too close to Blair’s grabby little claws for comfort.

Blair rolls onto her back and swings her paws at the man playfully, and when he chuckles Maka has to hold in a squeak at the low rumble that comes from him. For a moment she becomes entirely too distracted by his warm smile and the way he wiggles his fingers above her cat’s head, and she almost doesn’t notice when the palm hovering over Blair’s wriggling form reaches to stroke her soft belly. As tempting as such a location on her cat may look, that _not_ a place he should be touching.

“No!” Maka shouts in warning, standing up abruptly and hitting her elbow on the balcony’s ficus pot. Her neighbor lets out a curse and almost falls backwards into his kitchen, and Blair screeches and darts out of the room, hissing all the way down the hall and disappearing into another open door.

“Who the fuck are you?!” he howls about three octaves higher than earlier, gripping the towel around his waist like his life depended on it.

Maka’s hands are up and out in a panicked flurry. “Nonono! I know this looks bad, but I’m just here for my cat!”

She just now sees that the man is also brandishing a meat thermometer in his other hand, but he’s so frazzled he doesn’t even have the pointed end facing forward.

“How did you get in my house, you pervert!”

“Pervert!” Maka cries out indignantly. “I didn’t know you’d be naked. I didn’t know you’d be here at all!”

“So you just planned on breaking in?!”

Maka is beginning to realize how poorly thought through this plan was. “I don’t—I just—She was going to pee all over your house! She’s an asshole and she does it all the time to me and I didn’t want her to ruin all your stuff. I was just going to grab her and climb back down—”

“Wait.” He lowers his meat thermometer for a moment. “You climbed up the trellis?” Maka sighs and nods. “How were you going to get down with a cat in your arms?”

“I—” Maka pauses. “I don’t know.”

The man sighs too. “Listen, ‘m gonna go put some pants on and find your cat. You—just—just stay there. And pick up the ficus, please. It was a gift from my mother, and she’d kill me if I ruined it.”

Maka mechanically bends down and picks up the overturned pot as her neighbor retreats, taking extra time to scoop up the soil and woodchips from the ground and place them back into the pot. A few minutes later, the man returns, wearing a blue and white baseball tee and a pair of sweats, and holding a completely calm cat in his arms. The traitor.

He scratches the back of his neck. “So I guess she belongs to you?”

Maka closes her eyes and bows her head a little. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to cause you so much trouble!”

“It’s fine, I guess I just need to start locking my balcony door.” Maka can’t help but be a little hurt by that. But of course, she deserves it. She’s the pervert who broke into this man’s house. She wouldn’t be surprised if he bought a whole new security system thanks to her. “I mean, if this little guy could get in, who knows what other animals might stop by while I’m not paying attention.”

It occurs to Maka that he wasn’t talking about her breaking in, but rather, her cat. The fact that she was not included on the undesirable intruders list makes her feel a little better.

“Blair,” she tells him. “Her name is Blair. Oh, and I’m Maka,” she adds almost as an afterthought. “And don’t worry, she’s going to be locked up for a long time after this stunt.” Maka reaches her arms out for her cat, and he places Blair in them carefully. The second the tabby is transferred back into her rightful owner’s arms, she begins squirming.

“I’m Soul,” he says. He half-smiles and pets Blair again, and Maka is very tempted to throw the damn cat out the window when Blair immediately stills and presses her forehead into the man’s palm. She’s never done that for Maka.

“Well, I should be going. Thanks for giving me my cat back. And not, you know, pressing charges or anything.”

“Wait!”

Maka stops walking and turns. “Hmm?”

“Would you be interested in coming back sometime? I don’t really know anyone in town yet so I was thinking—” He coughs a little and rubs the back of his neck again. “I mean, we are neighbors after all. I’ll even let you climb the trellis again if you’re not comfortable using front doors.”

Maka lets out a high-pitched laugh, and she’s not sure if it’s from embarrassment or nerves. “S-sure, that’d be great.”

She notices she’s not the only one breathing a sigh of relief at her answer, and his nerves make her smile for a moment before the scent in the living room registers in her brain.

Her first date with the hot-guy-next-door ends up being the two of them cleaning cat pee out of his couch, and while it’s not how Maka would have planned for it to go, she still makes sure to give Blair a couple treats when she gets home.


	2. Cat Burglar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Maka flirts with her new neighbor, and Blair becomes intimately familiar with his undergarments.

"You're a rotten liar, you know that?" Maka says into the receiver of her phone, which is currently wedged in between her ear and her shoulder in way that's definitely cramping her neck.

She can hear Soul shuffle on the other end. "…Is this how you begin all phone conversations? No 'hello, Soul. How was your day, Soul?'"

Maka tip toes around her kitchen, doing her best to avoid crunching the millions of pieces of cereal littering the floor. Blair jumped on the refrigerator while Maka was in her room cleaning up a _different_ mess that Blair made, and now there's a sea of Cornflakes where there used to be dull gray tile. She finally spots what she's been looking for, her dustpan, and mock-hopscotches her way toward it. "Seems you're bad at avoiding questions, too."

Her neighbor sighs into the phone, and though Maka hasn't known him long, she can already tell that he probably has a hand to his temple and his eyebrows scrunched up in a mixture of mild annoyance and resignation at her antics. She almost giggles at the thought of it, but thinks better when she remembers that she's pretending to be serious.

"Fine," Soul says, "I give, what makes me a rotten liar?"

"Well, you know how my cat is in love with you?" she asks.

"And by 'love' you mean she tolerates me more than she seems to tolerate you?"

"She literally escapes to your house every chance she can get. She definitely loves you."

"Do you know how many pee stains I've had to clean up since meeting you? I had to buy my own litter box for a cat I don't even _own_ because of how often she comes to my house!"

"Ahh, so you see my point." Soul groans loudly into the phone and Maka laughs. She uses her hand to begin scooping handfuls of wasted cereal into the dustpan. "Anyways, I was cleaning up my exercise room the other day—"

"You mean the extra room in your house covered in books and dirty laundry that happens to have a treadmill in the corner?"

Maka scowls. "Will you let me finish my story?"

"Fine, fine."

"I was cleaning it up when I found something very peculiar."

"Again, no offense but you quote unquote 'exercise room' is a dump, so I'm not all that surprised."

Something in Maka stirs, and she can't be sure if it's her annoyance at him criticizing her house or her giddiness at the fact that he's in her home often enough to be comfortable criticizing it. After the initial Blair breaking-and-entering incident, Soul and Maka have hung out quite a bit. All casual, of course. Soul just moved here from his hometown in New England and is just getting to know people, so Maka has been careful to remain as platonic as possible, which isn't as torturous as she would have imagined.

While Soul appears pretty antisocial when it comes to almost everyone else he's met, he seems comfortable around Maka. He comes over to her house on his way home from work with pizzas and beer almost once a week, smiling his sharp-yet-lazy smile and inviting himself in. They've made a routine of sitting on the overstuffed red couch in her den and watching Disney movies together, paper plates balanced on their knees and Blair circling in and out of their legs. Maka has even gone so far as to make a list of all the movies they need to watch together, since Soul was apparently deprived as a child and wasn't allowed to watch Disney.

They've only been hanging out for a little over two months, so it's sometimes still hard to tell if Maka is being too casual with her hot next-door-neighbor or if they're legitimately close enough to razz each other about their quirks. Despite him calling her exercise room dumpy (which is a total exaggeration, there's like maybe one load of laundry on the floor, he's so dramatic), Maka feels a little bit gleeful that he feels he's earned the right to say that.

She of course doesn't let any of this show, though, and instead scoffs into her phone as she attempts to readjust it on her shoulder. "As I was saying, I found something peculiar. Of _yours_."

The background noise from the other end ceases for a moment, meaning he's probably gone still. "What do you mean?"

Maka dumps all of the cereal she could scrape up into the trash and swipes her hands across each other a few times to get the Cornflake dust off. Then she heads towards the aforementioned "exercise room."

"Well at first it was just that headband you said had gone missing last week. The one with the mouth and the squiggles on it that says 'Eat' or something."

"Wait, my old band headband from high school? How the hell did you get that?"

Maka finds the worn headband hanging over her ( _regularly-used_ ) treadmill. She picks it up and fingers one of the frayed edges. "Remember how I said my cat was in love with you?"

There's a pause, then Soul groans, loud and long. It's a noise Maka is very used to, since she's made a similar sound almost every day since she decided she was keeping Blair as her pet. Biggest. Mistake. Ever.

When the cat-induced groan finally stops, Soul speaks again. "So you're telling me not only does your cat regularly sneak into my house, but _she's stealing my stuff_?"

Maka laughs. "'Fraid so."

Soul sighs very softly. "Fuck Blair." Then, "Are you home? I'll come over and get my headband now if you are."

"Headband _and_ other possessions."

"Shit, are you serious?"

Still holding the tattered headband, she walks over to the closet and pushes one of the doors open with her foot to reveal a stash of clothing that doesn't belong to her. "Apparently it isn't your dryer that's been eating all your socks. Blair's just been slowing swiping every piece of clothing you own. The key's under the mat, by the way. Door might be locked."

She can hear some commotion from the front of her house, which she assumes to be Soul attempting to unlock her storm door. The lock sometimes sticks.

"God, she's been getting into the top drawer of my dresser," he realizes. "I can't believe I didn't notice so much of that stuff had gone missing." Maka can hear the door open, and is amused when Soul continues to stay on the phone with her as he walks through her house to find her. "Should I ask why there's half a box of cereal on your floor rather than in a bowl? Is this some new diet thing?"

"It's a I-definitely-need-a-new-cat kind of diet. Blair apparently thought the cereal looked better there."

"Of course she did. Rotten cat. Wait—what the hell does any of this have to do with me being a rotten liar?"

"Well, that's peculiar part," Maka says, bending down a little to paw through the pile of clothing hidden in her spare closet. "Two of Blair's catches of the day happened to be pairs of boxers." She hears the groan of the old wooden floor in the doorway behind her, and turns around with a pair of Soul's underwear in her hands. Soul's eyebrows shoot up. " _Disney_ boxers."

Soul rubs the back of his neck as he steps closer to her. "Well, you see—I just—"

"See what a mean?" Maka says with an airy laugh. "Rotten liar. You totally _have_ seen Disney movies before! No one else would own Jiminy Cricket and _Lady and the Tramp_ underwear if they hadn't. When we watched _Pinocchio_ you thought Jiminy was a frog!" Though Maka is clearly more bemused than she is upset, Soul absolutely refuses to make eye contact with her. In fact, his face happens to be a couple shades pinker than normal too, thought she can't fathom why. "Why'd you pretend you hadn't seen them?"

"I just—ah shit I wasn't trying to—" He clears his throat. "I just wanted to keep having movie nights, okay?"

Maka blinks. "Huh?"

"Look, after I said that I hadn't seen _Tarzan_ before—which I really hadn't, I swear—you got all worked up and decided we just _had_ to watch it now, and it was really fun, so I—I don't know. I just wanted to keep doing it so I mentioned another one. And then you started making a _list_ and it just seemed like a good excuse to keep hanging out, I guess." His eyes are practically burning a hole in her floorboards now, and she didn't really think it was possible for his face to get more red, but it is. "And, I don't know, it's been fun watching you sing all the songs and hold Blair up like she's baby Simba and try not to cry when Rapunzel's hair gets cut off and—and just watching _you_ watch the movies makes it better."

Maka doesn't really know what to say to all of this. On the one hand, it's super sweet that he went through the trouble of pretending he hadn't seen every iconic movie in history just so he could watch them with her. On the other hand, Maka totally would have watched them with him anyway even if he had seen them. She'd do basically anything to spend time with Soul, which she thought had been embarrassingly obvious.

She decides not to mention either of these facts, though, because Soul's head looks like it's going to explode from concentrating so hard on not looking at her, and she doesn't want to embarrass him further.

So instead she laughs a little and flings a pair of his boxers at his chest. "See? Rotten liar. I totally thought you were mouthing the words to 'Hakuna Matata.'"

He seems to deflate a little in relief, his shoulders sagging and his normal slouch back in his posture. "Yeah, it's one of my favorites."

Maka shakes her head a little, then stands up the rest of the way and turns to leave them room. She tries to keep her voice casual as she looks back over her shoulder at him. "Alright, well grab all of your stolen clothes and I'll go order us a pizza. _Little Mermaid_ was next on the list, right?"

He finally looks at her, and gives her one of his crooked smiles that makes _Maka's_ face begin to feel a little hot. "Yeah, I think it was."

And so their Disney movie nights continue as they normally would. Well, not totally. Now that the cat's out of the bag, so to speak, Maka does her best to try to get Soul to sing along to the musical numbers (which she's only partially successful in, since half the time Soul calls it _uncool_ to sing with her) and Soul does his best to do a Sebastian impersonation awful enough to make Maka snort soda out of her nose (which he's a lot more successful in doing). Maka still ends up dancing around her den with a very unhappy Blair in her arms during "Under the Sea", and Soul does his best to calm down the irritated cat while Maka gazes starry-eyed at the screen when Ariel and Flounder return to Ariel's cove of treasures.

Perhaps the biggest difference in their dynamic comes about halfway through the movie, when Soul takes the song "Kiss the Girl" extremely literally, and suddenly the movie doesn't seem so important anymore.


	3. Bath Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Maka really needs help, Soul really wants to sleep, and Blair really stinks.

There were few things in life that Soul hates more than being woken up early on the weekend.

One of those things was being woken up in the _middle of the fucking night_ on the weekend.

**From:** Maka Albarn   
**Received:** 3:48 am

Soul

**From:** Maka Albarn  
**Received:** 3:51 am

SOUL EVANS

**From:** Maka Albarn  
**Received:** 3:52 am

SOUL ANSWER YOUR PHONE I NEED YOUR HELP

Soul wipes the crust out of his eyes and reaches behind his bed to pull back his curtains, taking a tired glance at Maka’s house. As far as he can see, nothing is on fire, so he sends back a decisive:

**To:** Maka Albarn  
**Sent:** 3:55 am

n o

Two minutes later she is calling him. He remembers liking her, _really_ liking her, and kissing her face multiple times a day, but by God, right now he can’t remember why.

“Maka,” he says, and doesn’t even bother hiding how sleep-scratchy his voice is. Because he was _sleeping._ “It’s four in the morning. Why the fuck are you doing this to me.”

“One, it’s 3:57—” Soul almost hangs up right then and there “—and two, doing this to _you?_ You don’t even know what happened yet. If anything has happened, it’s happened to ME.”

“If you don’t get to the point in two seconds I’m hanging up and blocking your number.”

“Soul!”

“Maka, it’s SATURDAY.”

“…Blair was sprayed by a skunk and I don’t know what to do, okay?”

“Noooooononono,” Soul says. “There’s no way you’re getting me involved in another one of your cat escapades. Not at 4 am. Not on a Saturday.”

“But she likes you best! I know if you’re here you can keep her calm long enough for me to give her a bath!”

“If you think for one goddamn minute that I’m going to walk over to your house in the middle of the night to soothe your skunked-up devil cat while you wash her, you have another thing coming, Albarn. She is not. My. Cat.”

She’s quiet for a moment, so much so that Soul thinks he might have actually won this round, and that he’ll be able to go back to bed and sleep in until ten like he was destined to do. But then Maka finally responds, in her softest, most mournful voice.

“Please, Soul?”

And that’s how Soul ends up sitting in Maka’s bathroom at 4:11 am with a putrid-smelling cat in his arms and permanent frown on his face.

“You’re both dead to me, I hope you know that,” he says as he sits on Maka’s closed toilet seat.

Maka kisses him on the cheek, smiling brightly. “You’re the best, you know that?”

Manipulation at its finest.

As it turns out, Blair not only got sprayed by a skunk, but she _fought_ a skunk. The tips of her claws are still red from where she must have scratched it, and while the lack of injuries on the blue-gray tabby indicate that she probably won the fight, honestly it can’t be much of a victory if you end up getting sprayed with rancid gland juice.

_Soul_ feels like the real loser right now. In order to hold (a really awful, _awful_ -smelling) Blair in his arms without being clawed to death, he has to wear elbow-length rubber gloves. Which wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t also wearing a plastic yellow SeaWorld poncho.

“So you don’t get Blair’s skunk smell all over you clothes,” Maka had told him when she dressed up his half-asleep body in this ridiculous garb. But right now with patient zero sitting on his lap, Soul’s pretty sure the stench has already embedded itself a few layers deep in his skin. He’s lucky the only person he ever tries to impress is standing right in front of him, smelling just as horrible. He supposes that’s the only part of this situation that’s lucky.

“Alright, I think I have everything I need,” Maka says, looking down at her phone at what Soul assumes is a cat-bathing checklist. She’s also dressed up in her Blair-proof armor, complete with dorky goggles. “Brush, check. Cat shampoo and conditioner, check. Towels, check. Safety gear, check. Cat grooming companion—” she looks at Soul and grins. “—check. Now it says here that tomato sauce is good to help get rid of the smell, but all I have is tomato soup. Do you think that it works the same way?”

Blair squirms violently in his arms, thrusting her rank-smelling tail into his face. Soul swears he’s gonna puke. “If I say no does that mean I get to go home?”

Maka scowls at him for a moment before returning to her checklist. “Three cans of tomato soup will have to be good enough. Siri, remind me tomorrow to buy more soup to go with my grilled cheese.”

As Maka’s iPhone repeats her new to-do list back to her, Soul tries to get a better hold on Blair, who is currently tearing about forty holes into his ugly plastic poncho.

“I thought you said that me being here would calm her dOWn—” his voice spikes at the feeling of Blair’s claws scraping at the side of his neck.

“You shoulda seen her before you got here, then. Trust me, this is the closest we’re going to get to ‘calm,’ apparently. Blair doesn’t seem to like baths.”

Soul peers up at Maka. “What do you mean ‘doesn’t seem to like baths’? Are you saying you’ve never given Blair a bath before?”

Maka shrugs. “I take her to a groomer.”

Soul blanches. “And you didn’t think to do that THIS TIME?”

“Can you not smell my house right now?” Maka practically shouts at him. “Do you really think I’m going to let Blair roam around my house like this til morning?”

She has a point. The smell is so thick that Soul can hardly bare it, and that’s only an hour after Blair was sprayed. If Blair is left to her own devices then Maka’s whole house will smell rank as fuck by the time the sun came up. And knowing Soul’s luck, then she’d probably get into _his_ house somehow too. Stupid cat.

“Fine, just tell me what do so we can get this over with,” Soul says, trying to bat Blair’s deadly looking claws away from his head.

“Okay, well it says in the tutorial video that we shouldn’t have Blair in the room when we fill the bath because the noise makes cats antsy.” Soul doesn’t even say anything to this because he’s too busy wrestling Blair into sitting the _fuck_ still, goddammit. Maka watches him struggle for a moment, then pulls off one of her rubber gloves and nods. “Point taken. Let’s just shut the door and let her roam while we fill the bath. It’s not like she can get any worse than this, right?”

Soul really wishes Maka wouldn’t have said that.

The sound of the tub filling up with water makes Blair lose her goddamn _mind_.

Soul knows, objectively, that cats are fast, but he’s never seen one tear around such a small space before. Blair’s probably lapped the bathroom about thirty times (Soul’s too busy pulling his feet up onto the toilet seat to count) before Maka can turn the water off, screeching like the devil, and Maka’s thin plastic poncho now looks like Swiss cheese from the amount of claw marks in it. Soul was not ready for this when he woke up 20 minutes ago. He misses his bed. He misses sleep. He misses a time before he had cat scratches covering 90% of his body. And from the look on Maka’s face right now, she’s beginning to regret this decision too.

She shuts the water off as soon as human possible, with just enough water to cover the bottom of the tub a few inches deep. If she waited any longer she probably wouldn’t have had any poncho left. If Soul was still holding Blair he _definitely_ wouldn’t have had any face left.

When the faucet finally stops flowing, the bathroom is filled with an eerie, pregnant silence. Then, Blair begins to _wail._ She sounds like she’s being burned at the stake.

“Okay, is this normal?” Soul finally asks, from where he is now _standing_ on the toilet seat, one leg pulled up near his chest as twists away from the floor, hoping to get as far away from the manic cat as humanly possible.

“Well, cats don’t like water, right? That’s a thing that everyone knows about cats,” Maka says, trying to sound factual but looking incredibly defeated as she smears a tiny bit of blood that’s welled up on the back of her ungloved hand.

“Maka, you know nothing about cats. You’re not even a cat person. This whole thing was a horrible idea. I think it would be better—”

Maka glares at him. “If you say you want to go back to bed _one more time_ —”

“Forget my bed, I just want to live through this experience!” Soul says, and Blair only proves his point more by hiding in the corner of the bathroom farthest from the tub and hissing hellishly. “You see! She’s scared and definitely capable of killing both of us, so why don’t we just put her in her carrier for the night so she doesn’t stink up your house, then take her to the groomer tomorrow!”

Which is actually a pretty rational and well-thought out plan. So of _course_ Maka hates it.

“We’re already in here doing this, so let’s just get it done, okay? We got this.” Was this her rationale when she first broke into his house all those months ago after he finished his shower? She’d already committed so why not go all the way?

He’s very tempted to let her do this on her own. He really likes Maka but he also really likes having all ten fingers, and these two likes are beginning to feel very at odds with each other giving the current terrified cat hunched up in the corner of the bathroom.

But then he sees Maka’s determined pout as she scoots on her knees towards Blair, arms held out and definitely about to be torn off by her psychotic cat. Her dorky goggles are slipping off her head a little bit, her pigtails askew from Blair’s most recent attacks, but very much ready to give her stinky cat a bath just because she put her mind to it. Soul sighs. If there’s anyone in the world that he’d be willing to lose appendages for at four in the morning, it’s this woman.

He exhales slowly and climbs down off the toilet seat. “Wait, wait. Let me help you. She likes me better.”

He gets down on all fours and crawls next to Maka, then slowly, slowly, he begins inching towards Blair.

“Hey there, girl,” he says softly. “We know you’re scared. We promise to make this as easy as possible. We’re not going to hurt you.”

“You sound like you’re negotiating with a criminal,” Maka whispers to him, and while that’s…actually pretty true, he waves her away with a rubber-gloved hand and continues his soft crooning.

“There, there,” he’s only about a foot away from Blair now, and notes with some success that she’s stopped her wild hissing and has resorted to pitiful _mow mow mow’_ s. Poor cat. “It’s gonna be alright, stinky. We’re gonna get you all cleaned up so you can go back to harassing animals who you can actually beat in a fight, kay?”

He reaches his arms out for her, and Blair YOWLS. She swipes at him desperately, and Soul shrinks back towards Maka, who also skitters back on the tiled floor. Even in their Blair-proof dork armor he still feels terribly exposed to those claws.

“Maybe you’re right,” Maka says.

“About what?”

“Waiting until tomorrow. I don’t want to make Blair even more uncomfortable than she already is, and I don’t think getting mauled to death is worth the tradeoff of having a clean cat.”

Soul watches as she takes off her goggles and gloves and sets them on the bathroom counter in defeat. Tired as he is, Soul still feels for her. Her house fucking reeks, and now it’s only going to be worse.

“Hey,” Soul says as he removes his cat-bathing clothing too. “If you want, you can stay at my place for the night so at least you don’t have to smell this all night.”

Maka smiles as him. “Sounds like a good idea. Hey, can you stay in here for a second with Blair while I go get her carrier? I don’t think we can both get out without her racing off.”

Soul nods, and goes to sit on the toilet seat with his feet up in case Blair starts running again. As Maka goes to the door, she makes shooing motions towards Blair to move out of the way, but the cat doesn’t budge.

“Come on, Blair, move. I gotta get through. We’re not gonna bathe you, so you can stop being a scaredy cat now. No pun intended.”

The tabby continues to sit by the bathroom door, lolling onto her side and stretching her legs out languidly.

Maka scoffs and turns to Soul. “Can you believe her? It’s like she knows what we’re saying. How is she not freaking out anymore?”

Soul watches as Blair continues to rolls around on the floor, whapping her tail back and forth contentedly now that she isn’t forced to bathe. He doesn’t understand it either, not until Blair’s tail rattles one of the cupboards under the sink and causes some of their cat-proof armor to fall to the bathroom floor.

 Blair haunches shoot straight up, and within seconds of her practically purring as she rolled about on the tile, she’s now back to hissing like a wild animal, ears pressed to her skull and teeth bared.

Maka leaps back. “What is _wrong_ with her?”

But Soul finally understands. He gets off the toilet seat. “I can’t believe it. After all this time this—” he bends down to scoop up the rubber gloves, “—is what she’s been afraid of.”

And he’s right. Once the offensive pieces of pink rubber have been lifted from the tiles, Blair’s ears flick back up and she quiets. He can actually see her claws retract back into her paws.

Maka blanches. “You’re shitting me.”

He tries not to let himself get too over-confident as he bends down before Blair and holds out his bare hand. “How about now, Blair?”

And after only a moment’s hesitation, Blair leans forward and presses her head into his open palm.

Maka’s voice echoes from behind him. “Are. You. SERIOUS.”

Soul rolls his eyes and holds his hands out for Blair, who compliantly walks right between them. “Come on, you dumb cat.”

He lifts her up into his arms (knowing full-well he’ll have to burn his PIANOMAN t-shirt now) and walks her over to the tub. She meows quietly at the sight of the water, but Soul runs his fingers through the stinky fur on the back of her neck until she quiets, then sets her gently in the water. And then, bafflingly, she begins to swim in small circles.

Maka stands beside Soul, gaping.

“So…” Soul says. “I guess Blair likes baths?”

The rest of the night is so comically easy that _Maka_ is the one who spends most of it bitching. As they rub cat shampoo and Campbell’s soup into Blair’s fur Soul can still hear her muttering “Rubber gloves, Blair? Really??” but he just continues gently pouring cups of water over the cat and making shushing noises to both. Her grumbling continues all the way until the bath is finished and Soul has to remove Blair from the water (almost forcibly, goddamn this cat loves swimming) and all they have left is towel-drying Blair and brushing her fur through a few more times.

“All that time we spent almost dying, and she _likes_ bathing. What kind of cat even are you?” Maka asks Blair, hoisting her up by her armpits to scrutinize her face more closely, like looking Blair in the eyes will give her the answers she’s seeking.

Soul snickers and tugs the damp cat out of Maka’s hands, setting her on the floor to roam the bathroom.

Maka sighs and leans back against the cupboards from where she sits on the floor, dropping her shoulders dramatically. At least it’s finally over.

“Thank you, by the way,” she says. “I never would have been able to do this without you here to help.”

“Ahh, ‘s no big deal,” Soul says sheepishly, despite making it seem like a very big deal less than an hour ago. “So what are you going to do now?”

Maka looks at Blair, then her mucked up bathroom, then towards the door, where the rest of her stinky house awaits her. Her shoulders sag even more.

“Alright, I’ll tell you what,” Soul says. “You come back to my house with me and get cleaned up. You can stay at my place for the night so you don’t have to smell all that—“ he vaguely gestures towards what’s outside her bathroom door, “—and then tomorrow I’ll help you de-stink your house. And now that’s she clean, Blair can even come too.”

Maka smiles a bit before crawling up beside him and kissing him senseless.  “You’re the best, you know that?”

He knew there was a good reason for helping out his neighbor tonight.


	4. Meet the Evans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Maka meets the parents.

“This isn’t going to work.”

“It HAS to, Soul. You know it has to.”

“Yes, but Wes is smarter than me, Maka! And I realized that you were crazy within the first 10 seconds of meeting you. Hey, what the f—OW! Did you just pinch me?”

“Be nice! And you really need to get over the breaking and entering thing. Now that we’re dating that memory should be filed under ‘quirky and cute’ by now.”

“You broke my mom’s ficus! Blair peed on my couch!”

“That is _so_ not the point of this conversation. Now hold her steady. But look natural! And look like you love me.”

“…..”

“Try harder than that.”

Soul had imagined this going very differently. Having Maka meet his family was a giant step in their relationship, not only because she was _meeting his family_ , but because his family was meeting _her._ A girlfriend. Which Soul had. Nothing about this situation was a usual occurrence for Soul.

So it only made sense for him to be out of his mind with anxiety about it. After all, Maka was quite possibly the love of his life. Bringing her to meet not only Wes, but his _parents_ , had a very high potential of jinxing their entire relationship. It’s not as if the Evans were easy to get along with, or even particularly inviting, for that matter. If Soul had anything to say about them based on how they treated _him,_ they were downright unpleasant more often than not.

But Maka was Maka, a charming and beautiful and intelligent girl who was sure to win the heart of his family so long as she stuck to the notecards Soul so painstakingly wrote up for her to try and teach her something about music. And if she avoided talking too much about her cat.

“Do you think she can breathe in there?” Maka asks, peering down at the luggage Soul was carrying.

Herein lies Soul’s main problem.

“Maybe she suffocated in there. Maybe she’s dead and gone and all our problems for this weekend will go back to being whether or not you can recognize a quarter note, not _smuggling your cat into my parents’ summer home.”_

The heat behind his words is totally lost on Maka, who sees the duffel bag jostle a bit in Soul’s careful grasp. She breathes a sigh of relief. “No, she moved. She’s still alive.”

Soul groans. They are approaching the incredibly large front porch of the Evans house, about to start their weekend trip with the most aggravating family in the world, and Soul can’t even properly be concerned about that because he is too focused on trying not to accidentally-on-purpose murder Maka’s troublesome cat.

“You could’ve found a cat sitter,” he says between closed teeth to Maka, like he’s already being watched by his family and needs to be seen smiling. “I _know_ you could’ve.”

Maka does not share the same paranoia that Soul does, however, and whips her head around to glare at him. “And just who do you think would take her, huh? The only person who can tolerate her— _barely—_ is you! And if I took her to an animal daycare she would either cause fights or break out. I’ve tried before.”

They’ve had this conversation a million times already, from the time Soul first questioned what she planned on doing with Blair up until the time he heard Maka’s extra duffel bag begin to hiss in the back seat of hier car. Maka’s eyebrows are tipped down in a determined grimace, her cheeks puffed out a bit in defiance, and Soul can’t help but sigh. _This_ is where he chose to lay his affections. The second he found her hiding behind his balcony ficus all those months ago he should have known he was in trouble.

“And it’s not like it’s MY fault that your parents don’t allow pets in their house. I mean really, why were they so hellbent on repressing you as a child? First Disney movies and now this!”

“I told you the Disney movie ban was a lie, Maka. And they weren’t ‘hellbent on repressing me.’ Well, not in this case, anyway. Mom is allergic to pet dander.”

Her expression doesn’t change. “I still don’t like it.”

Soul rolls his eyes. She’s angry just because she wants to be now, so there’s no point in arguing with her. Besides, there are bigger problems at hand now. They’re standing on the porch now, and all of a sudden Soul feels like his stomach is going to drop right out of him. This was a bad idea. This whole thing was a bad idea. He’s been so focused on the damn cat that he hasn’t even had time to mentally prepare himself for this moment. He’s seeing his parents after years of being apart—years that he tried his hardest to _avoid_ seeing them, actually.

What the hell was he even doing here? What kind of inane tradition is it to have your girlfriend meet your parents when it starts getting serious? That’s how you RUIN a relationship, not strengthen it!

He knows the proper thing to do is knock, but the logical thing to do is run back to the car and drive very far away. He shouldn’t be subjecting Maka to this.

But, because he is Soul Evans and therefore never has luck on his side, the door opens in a flourish before he can flee, and standing in the foyer with a thousand-watt smile is Yvonne Evans, in all her glory.

“Hey, Mom,” he says, his voice a lot smaller than it was just moments ago.

Her voice is dripping with affection so thick and sugary and fake that Soul can already feel his smile beginning to falter.

“Oh, honey, we’ve missed you so much! I can’t believe it’s been _four years since I’ve seen you in person_.” The implication is heavy enough to knock out a fucking tank. Soul’s smile continues to slip. “And to think it’s because you _finally_ have a girlfriend!”

And so it begins.

* * *

It’s 1 am and Soul is still pacing his old bedroom in a blind fury.

“Don’t you think you’re overthinking this a little bit?” Maka asks mildly from the queen-sized bed that replaced his childhood one the day after he moved out. The lilac sheets accent the tan-colored walls and the cream-colored trim and the absolute dullness of the room as a whole. When this was Soul’s room it was _cool_ , with guitars hung on the walls and reds and yellows and blues covering everything in a bright-colored mess that made it very _Soul._ This room has the personality of a cheap bed and breakfast.

“You don’t get it! All of that bullshit, they were doing it on purpose!”

“They weren’t _that_ bad—”

Soul cuts her off. “She called you Macey, Maka!” He turns on his heel and begins another round of pacing, his hands linked behind his head. “She _knows_ your name, I told her like a thousand times. She said it wrong on purpose.”

“But why?”

“To irritate me. To make her look bashful and forgetful and charming for trying to remember it in the first place. To show that you don’t mean enough to her to say it correctly.”

“You’re putting an awful lot of meaning into one mistake, Soul.”

“Just trust me, okay? This is what they _do._ They make themselves look like honest people while actively trying to reduce the things I care about to nothing. It’s the Evans way.”

He wished that he still had that rope ladder in his closet that he had when he was little. They could have snuck out of the house in the middle of the night and left this awful place behind. This was a stupid idea to begin with and he doesn’t know why he thought it would turn out any differently.

Sometime during his internal monologuing Maka has stood up to stop his maniacal pacing. He can feel her hand rest on his shoulder and tug a little, and with a sigh Soul turns to face her.

“You need to take a deep breath,” she says with a small smile. He rolls his eyes and complies, breathing in deeply, and waits. Maka laughs. “And let it out, too.” He blows out a raspberry that makes his bangs flutter a bit in front of his eyes. He really does need to calm down. He sits on the dull purple bedspread and Maka follows.

He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands, dragging them down his face. “Sorry I’m acting so weird. I just don’t like them treating you like crap.”

“Soul, can I say something kind of rude?” Maka asks, and Soul raises an eyebrow. “I think you were raised by a bunch of jerks.”

This is not what Soul expected to hear at all, and he can’t help the surprised and delighted laugh that escapes him.

“—But I don’t really care that your mom is really fake-polite or your dad is really cold because I’m not here for them, I’m here for _you,_ okay? So you don’t have to worry about how they treat me, because it doesn’t change how great I think you are.”

Her honesty makes his stomach do a nervous little flip despite the fact that he’s been dating her for almost a year and she’s told him this a hundred times before. Being in love is weird like that.

Soul bumps his shoulder with Maka’s. “I like you a lot, Maka Albarn.”

She nudges him with her elbow. “Back atcha, Soul Evans.”

It’s at that moment that Maka’s illegally-smuggled cat decides to emerge from under Soul’s former bed. She’s been hanging out in this room all night and has only peed on the floor once, which Soul doesn’t blame her for at all. The hastily-put together litter box sitting in the corner of the room has remained immaculately untouched. Neither Soul nor Maka is surprised.

“C’mere, you asshole,” he says and picks up Blair from the floor to set her on his bed. He strokes her from head to tail a couple of times, a little bit glad that Maka brought her because it’s given him something else to focus on besides his dad’s sour-faced scrutiny of Maka when she told him she’s a horrible cook and doesn’t get along well with children.  He wonders how they would have reacted if they found out she sometimes unironically called herself a Cat Mom to a feline that actively makes her life hell. He can only imagine his parents’ expressions.

Though nothing could be worse than the look on their faces when Maka said she didn’t understand music. _That_ went over well.

It’s never mattered to Soul, whether or not Maka was a musician. In fact, it probably helped their relationship that her opinion of a song was solely based on the catchiness of it and nothing more. The lack of judgment meant that for once, Soul was able to play his keyboard or guitar in someone’s presence without his stomach climbing up into his throat. He didn’t even tell her about the whole “my family is made up entirely of classical musicians who will eat you alive if you aren’t a snob like they are” thing until a month ago, when his parents invited him back home for this stressful weekend. His whole tragic backstory about being the family disappointment didn’t seem all that important to mention prior to this.

Soul lets out a loud sigh as he lets Blair bump her head against his palm. Maka interprets it easily and pulls him in a for kiss.

“Just one more day, then we’re gone,” she says quietly, and Soul closes his eyes and nods, his forehead still touching hers.

* * *

They go to sleep soon after that, Maka spooning Soul beneath the ugly purple comforter, and manage to get almost three hours of sleep before being jolted awake by Blair jumping off the bed and tearing around the room at speeds faster than human eyes can follow.

Soul wakes with a start. He sits up halfway and mutters a bleary “Whaaa? Who—? Maka, what’s happening…”

Her fingers climb up to his bare shoulder and try to pull him back down. “It’s Blair, don’t bother. She’ll get tired eventually.”

But her devil cat is running around the room like it’s on fire and she’s searching for an exit, and when she bangs into the nightstand beside them and knocks alarm clock on the floor Soul sits up again.

“Auhghg, she’s gonna wake up the whole house like this. Blair, fuck you, stop running.”

Blair keeps running.

Maka snorts and Soul can feel it against the arm she’s currently snuggling. “Did you think that was gonna work?”

Soul carefully extracts his arm from Maka’s grip, causing her to whine a little, and rolls himself out of the bed onto the floor. He grabs for the cat, who still hasn’t grasped that nighttime is for _sleeping,_ and is now _mow-mow-mow-_ ing like it’s time for Kitty Choir Class.

“Blair _stop,_ Jesus Christ.” He gets both of his hands somewhere on her middle and tries to pick her up, but she’s clearly in some kind of mood and not having it, because she swipes at him with a claw and manages to scratch him on the upper arm and run away from him. “FUck,” he curses, trying belatedly to lower his voice.

“I told you to just wait for her to stop, but noooo, let’s not listen to Maka,” Soul hears his girlfriend murmur from behind him. In the darkness of the room the best he can do is swat in Maka’s general direction. He feels his hand make contact with some part of her, which only causes her to giggle more at his expense.

“If my family wakes up because of this, you’re gonna be in big—”

There’s a knock at their door.

Soul turns to look at Maka, not believing it until they hear a second round of knocking. Maka tenses beneath the covers. Fuck.

Soul looks to Maka for some kind of direction, but she looks just as shell-shocked as he is, and someone needs to do something because there definitely isn’t supposed to be a cat in this room and Soul doesn’t need another reason for his parents to hate Maka.

He doesn’t care this time when Blair scratches him again, just picks her up and tosses her in the direction of the bed, waiting until Maka has her shoved under the covers before he opens his door three inches and leans against the frame.

“What’s up?”

The hall light illuminates Wes’s form, his expression tipped downwards in irritation.

“Are you _trying_ to piss off Mom and Dad?”

Soul’s voice squeaks up three octaves. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not an idiot, Soul. I’m your brother, I know when you’re lying. If you and Maka are gonna fool around, at least do it quietly. Our parents are right down the hall from you.”

Soul’s eyes threatening to bug completely out of his head. “ _What?_ ”

Wes looks pointedly at the scratch marks on Soul’s shoulder. The cogs in his brain begin to slowly turn, and he can feel his face getting incredibly hot. “You’re not exactly subtle, bro.”

Soul’s brain is short-circuiting. “That’s not—we weren’t—"

“Look, I don’t give a damn about it, but you know Mom and Dad will. So tell your girlfriend to keep the moaning to minimum before we all get read the riot act.” His eyes slide down to meet Soul’s and his mouth quirks up in the shadow of a knowing smile. “Unless those sounds were coming from you.”

Soul can’t make words. “I—I—that wasn’t—”

“Good night, little brother.”

And then Wes is leaving, flicking off the hall light and returning to _his_ old room, the one that his parents have left miraculously unchanged despite the fact that he moved out eight years ago. Soul closes the door with a quiet click.

He looks at Maka, who’s sitting up and has her covers pulled up to her chin in a way that does look pretty damning, at least until she lets the covers drop and he can see a squirming tabby being held tightly to her body with one arm. Soul can still his heart pounding in his ears, but Maka has a wry smile on her face.

“Did you hear that Soul? Sounds like you need to moan a little quieter. Last thing we need is your parents hearing that you’re letting a music-hater have her way with you.”

He glowers at her and takes the cat out of her arms so he pin Maka back down to the bed. She laughs again as he hovers over her.

“Your cat is going to give me a heart attack one day, you know that?”

Maka shrugs. “She makes our relationship interesting.”

“I need a drink.”

“You need to go sleep,” she says, pulling him down until he falls messily, landing half on the mattress and half on her. She kisses the crown of his head. “ _We_ need to go to sleep, before someone else can yell at us.”

Soul rolls off of Maka and trails his hand over the side of the bed until Blair bumps it with her forehead. He scoops her up awkwardly with one arm and plops her on the bed, waiting until the cat was settled in between them before finally laying down completely. T minus ten hours and they were going home.

* * *

Packing up to leave is probably the best part of the whole trip, or at least it would be if Blair wasn’t, by definition, a pain in the ass.

Soul and Maka stuff their three pairs of clothes and six novels (Maka, why) into two backpacks and then use the other two duffel bags to try and contain one giant bag of kitty litter, at least sixteen feather and bell toys (Maka, _why_ ), and one incredibly rowdy cat. It seems that since Blair’s been in the duffel once before and knows what to expect, she wants nothing to do with it. The second Maka pulled it out of Soul’s old closet, Blair had hidden herself in the impossibly small space between the bedframe and the floor. Soul can’t even get his arm underneath the bed.

“Maybe we should just leave her here,” Soul says, yanking his arm out from where he had it half-shoved under the box spring, rubbing his shoulder. “It would be due punishment for my mom for ruining this room.”

Maka makes some quiet kissy noises near the bed, though Soul knows that it’s not going to do anything, since Blair has never listened to Maka a day in her life and surely isn’t going to start now.

She sighs. “It’s because we want to leave so bad. She can sense discomfort, I swear. I think she thrives on it.”

Soul can’t argue with this statement, so he goes back to shoving his arm beneath the bed, like maybe doing it a fourth time will magically make the space bigger. He wants to get out of here, before he has to talk to his parents some more about how he dashed all their hopes for him or Wes can look at Maka like she’s some kind of harlot. Breakfast had been supremely awkward. The knowing looks that Wes kept sliding Soul’s way were incredibly unsettling, and while Maka tried her best to maintain her charming persona for the entire meal, it looked like she was having a hard time looking Wes in the eye. They didn’t even _do_ anything, but having Wes think they did was embarrassing enough to make for a quiet meal.

A knock at the door has Soul flinching violently, thinking of last night, so this time he extracts himself from beneath the bed, squares his shoulders, and steps out into the hallway, making sure to shut the door behind him. He looks his mother in the eye and manages to successfully lie that Maka is still getting dressed, praying that she gets Blair in the bag _fast_ so they can _go._

“Hey, Mom. How’s it hanging?”

He says it mostly as a joke, but she doesn’t smile. He sighs. “How are you today, Mother?” The “mother” is a little excessive, but she hasn’t even spoken to him yet and he’s already tired of this conversation.

“Leaving already?” She asks, eyebrow arched.

“Yeah, well, I gotta get home to work on a thing, and Maka has an appointment, so, you know….” He shrugs uncomfortably. “Gotta get back soon.”

There’s a thump from behind him that makes his mother glance curiously past his shoulder at his old bedroom door. Soul does his best to not turn around and look with her.

“Sooo—” he says a little louder, trying to block out the shuffling noises coming from Maka and Blair. “It was nice seeing you and Dad again. And Wes. Good family time. We’ll have to do this again sometime,” he says, and immediately regrets that last part because he _really_ doesn’t want that.

“In another four years?” she says, because she knows he misspoke and wants to exploit it.

He clears his throat uncomfortably. “It…probably won’t be that long this time. There was just a lot going on, you know.”

The judgment in her face is clear as day. “You know, you’re always welcome to come back.” Soul thinks of the tan walls in the room behind him and knows that’s not true. “I know you think music isn’t the right path for you, but with a little bit more _focus_ and some extra guidance I know you could make it far. You’re very talented, Soul.” Soul would have taken the comment graciously if he was still sixteen and his mother had thought to say that after he had played for her, but now it’s just salt in a wound that never fully healed.

“I’ve moved on, Mom. You know that. I have my own life now, my own house, a girlfriend—”

His mother’s eyes flick to the door again. “Yes, this Macey of yours—”

“ _Maka,_ Mom. Her name is Maka. She’s important to me, even if you don’t think so. And she’s made me happier than playing piano ever has.” He says it with a hardness in his voice that doesn’t leave room for argument. It feels like an incredibly brave thing to say, and Soul works hard to keep eye contact with his mother after saying it.

His mother’s mouth opens, and Soul has no idea what she’s going to say, but he doesn’t get to find out because it’s at that moment that Maka opens the door and slips out, smiling brightly at Soul and politely at his mother.

“Hi! Just wanted to tell you that we’re all packed up,” she says to him. Her hair is a little messy, no doubt from trying to wrestle Blair into sitting in a duffel bag, and Soul takes a moment to card his fingers through her bangs and smooth them out. He notices his mother staring, but doesn’t stop.

“Good to hear,” he says, looking only at Maka. “I’ll go bring the car up front.”

He heads back down the hall without another word, but smiles a little when he hears his mom begin to sneeze.

* * *

“I heard what you said to your mom,” Maka says quietly as she puts the last of their bags in the backseat of her car.

Soul puts a seatbelt around one specific duffel bag, not responding to Maka’s statement because he’s not entirely sure what to say. Was it too bold of him? Did she think he was lying just because he was mad at his mom? Should he take it back?

She puts a hand on his, stopping him from closing the car door. He stops what he’s doing to look down at her.

“I love you, too.”

It’s not that they’ve never said it before, but something about it feels different now, and Soul’s heart does a funny little squeeze in his chest. He loves her _so much._

He kisses her instead, because he’s not great with words and this the best he can do, and he knows Maka knows that and loves him anyway. He doesn’t deserve her.

His hands are still cupping her cheeks, mouth still moving against hers, when he hears someone clear their throat behind them. The break apart to see Wes looking at them slyly.

“Just came out to say goodbye, but it looks like I’m interrupting again, so—”

Maka clears her throat a little and turns to face Wes, holding her hand out. “It was nice to meet you, Wes.”

He grabs her hand in his firm Evans grasp and shakes it. “Likewise. You’ll have to come around again sometime. Maybe sans parents, next time.”

Soul agrees wholeheartedly. He hugs Wes briefly, one of those one-armed man-hugs that lasts for two seconds before Wes claps him loudly on the shoulder. “Take care, Soul.”

“See you around, Wes.”

That’s about as sentimental as they get, so Soul places a hand on Maka’s elbow and leads her back to the car, intent on finally leaving this whole weekend behind him. Maka makes a little noise from the back of her throat as she shuts the back door, which Soul takes as agreement that she wants to leave, too. He goes over to the driver’s side and climbs in, reaching across the console for Maka’s keys when she makes that grunting noise again. Soul looks over at her, eyebrows raised, but Maka’s not looking at him. She’s not making that noise, either. Soul follows her wide-eyed gaze to the back seat, at the unzipped duffel bag still harnessed by the seatbelt.

“Is—is that a _cat?_ ” Soul hears from outside of the car.

Blair meows again and presses her paw up against the back window, staring directly at Wes.

Soul takes this as the perfect opportunity to put the car in drive. The cat’s out of the bag, and they’re finally, _finally_ going home.


End file.
